Pluto and Proserpina
by Sekah
Summary: Historical AU - With the failure of a Britannic rebellion against Roman rule, Kurama finds himself transported to a new world of cunning, intrigue and cruelty, the puppet court of the Emperor Karasu. Karasu/Kurama, Hiei/Kurama, and many more pairings.
1. Fortuna

**Author's Note:** Yes, I know, I know, another new historical AU. This one's based on the historic Emperor Nero of Ancient Rome, and the Britannic rebellion in Iron Age England that occurred during his reign, led by the Celtic warrior woman Boudica (here played by Mukuro). Enjoy.

**A Note on the Title:** Pluto and Proserpina are the Roman equivalent of Hades and Persephone. Pluto, or Hades, is well known as the God of the Dead, and Proserpina, or Persephone, is the Goddess he abducted to be his queen.

**A Note on the Chapter Title:** Fortuna was the Roman goddess of luck.

**Disclaimer:** Yu Yu Hakusho is © Yoshihiro Togashi, Funimation, Shounen Jump, ADV Films, etc. I donít own Yu Yu, I just play around with the characters (and I'm not earning money by doing so).

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><p><strong>Fortuna<strong>

.

General Hiei, _legatus legionis_ of the Twelfth Roman Legion—first in command behind the Governor of the province of Britannia, Butajiri—tried to blink the ash from his tearing eyes. He wanted to forget himself and paw at his bare cheeks, skinned alive by the wind's scythe blade. He'd always hated the North; the sky was a different color here. The craggy Britons with their ice-crusted beards and the torpid she-wolves they loved made him long more and more each day for the sunny overcrowded noise of Rome.

Hiei watched a bedraggled eagle veer above billows of smoke, pale against the dreary sky. The screams of women and high-pitched sobs of children were less interesting to Hiei than the bird's screech. His face relaxed, the uprising's bloody finish fading back into nothing, smoke and scenery, as unremarkable as the ancient trees entwining beyond Manduessedum's walls. Hiei noticed a young soldier draw back his pilum, his eyes fixed on tawny wings, and his expression flattened. A pilum's tip bent or broke on contact with its target, and no experienced fighter would willingly have destroyed one for a bird. The legionary, thinking to skewer himself a meal, hurled his weapon adeptly. Sun glinted off its metal point, but the eagle rode an updraft. The pilum fell well short, arcing rapidly from the sky to the ground where it sunk, shuddering, into the blood-clogged dirt next to an unburied corpse.

"General Hiei," a soldier said in greeting, saluting rapidly. Hiei's eyes narrowed slightly, looking away finally from the body of the soldier. He had seen that one die. The first arrow had merely wounded him, but a second had gotten him through the throat, slaying him instantly. The smug presence of the soldier-turned-courier before him mocked the legionary's pitiful form, slumped in front of a siege engine leaning against Manduessedum's walls. The man was infuriatingly relaxed, like a cat fat on milk, blood and dirt beneath his fingernails. Hiei's eyes pressed him, and the smile on the soldier's face slid into a business-like expression.

"Speak," Hiei snapped.

"The Governor wishes to discourse with you. It's about gifts for the Emperor, sir."

Hiei scowled. The Emperor had demanded good-looking creatures for his sport. Naturally, of the slaves taken today, the most beautiful would be brought back in a different cage than the unlucky rest, those forced to service their captors as the whim took his brutish soldiers.

Thinking of the nature of their current Emperor, Hiei revised his estimation of luck. Red eyes watched dispassionately as a woman streaked out of one of the smoking, splintered gates, getting only a few desperate lengths in before a chasing soldier swung her to the ground by her shawl, slamming onto her with a second legionary as she clawed at the grass, wrestling and shrieking. The general's eyes met hers, fierce and defiant and scared, for only a second. He looked away, surprised at his own weakness. The sound of the woman's struggles grew fainter as Hiei reluctantly accepted the soldier's hand up and mounted his horse. He kicked on Black Dragon, his beautiful Persian mare, and galloped around the burning walls of the Britannic stronghold, his face grim.

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><p>Kurama was all that stood between these men and the long goblin tongues of their torches and all that he loved, which felt lost already. The burning brands spat cinders that left black dabs on the gore-and-mud-streaked iron of their helmets and ashy pockmarks on their faces, the grim faces of men entered into brutal manhood. They looked with yellow smiles or eyes made red by the torchlight at the corpse of his mother, crumpled behind him like a girl's straw doll, and his little brother who clung to her futilely. The shabby doorway of the cottage they'd been assigned to only a few weeks ago arched above his brother's head. The hut had been built as a storehouse, and Kurama had no ties to it, had no hope or ability to protect it. At the moment it symbolized home, however, and so the irrationality of defense was not forefront in Kurama's mind.<p>

Shuuichi was crying. Kurama raised the knife he held in a tight fist, knowing the pointlessness of it, a knife against swords.

"_No,"_ he repeated in their vulgar language, the only word he knew. He was shaking, crying and red-eyed from the smoke gusting into his vision, crying from more than the smoke. His winter clothes had gone to the warriors—he still wore his tatty summer wrappings. He was cold, scared, and knew deep in his heart how useless this was.

One of the legionaries struck while Kurama's attention was elsewhere, and Shuuichi shrieked behind him. Kurama whipped around, slashing ineffectually at the man's snide face, a blow that would have been deflected by the metal guards on the man's plumed helmet anyway. A hand grabbed his wrist and Kurama was dragged clear off his feet, yelping, feeling dirty and pathetic. He was unsurprised by his failure, though he watched them like a hissing cat, leaning back but keeping his body still.

Their alien faces drew close once the knife dropped, his wrist crushed until his fingers loosened from pain and lack of circulation. He glared at them, trembling, knowing the Romans were famous boy-lovers and worried more for Shuuichi than himself. The loving of men was a common practice in Kurama's tribe—the loving of boys, however, neutered their warrior spirit, and was frowned upon.

Wrestling with the man's grip brought a knee into his stomach. Kurama's mouth was forced open while he was disoriented, his teeth examined, fingers prodding at his gums. He bit at them, earning a backhand that made blood spurt against his tongue from the inside of his cheek, sliced open by his own teeth. From the corner of his eye, he could see Shuuichi shrinking and cowed as he received similar treatment. Kurama's tunic was yanked up, exposing his starved, bruised chest, showing more ribs than it had a year or two ago at this time.

The legionaries chuckled. One man's hand reached into Kurama's wrappings, fondling him crudely. Kurama kicked—the man hit. When Kurama kicked again, the man pointed at Shuuichi, and Shuuichi earned a harsh cuff for Kurama's troubles. Another soldier drew his gladius and held the blade close to Shuuichi's neck.

_Cowards,_ Kurama thought, staring for a moment into Shuuichi's round eyes, which begged him to be prudent. Aloud, he said nothing, unwilling to risk his brother's life. Leaf-green eyes glared openly at his captors, Kurama's jaw clenched and his chin dimpling with suppressed rage.

Around them was mayhem: people ran and screamed, women forced callously to the dirt. The looters set houses on fire and watched the consuming flames gleefully, their sacks filled with the sparse valuables the defenders had left and their hands dragging chains of captives they'd soon resell to the slave merchants. Kurama looked around him, at the narrow streets belching smoke and running wet with blood, and couldn't fathom all the cruelty. The captives the legionaries led away were mostly women and children, the men already dead defending the stronghold of Manduessedum, or in previous battles, or tossed like bags of millet into the dirt all around Kurama, throats slashed, bellies open, bodies reeking of gore and blood.

Mukuro was dead. Their ferocious woman leader had committed suicide rather than be subjected to the mercy of the Romans, those starving wolves that showed no mercy. Kurama didn't blame her. His heart ached instead, knowing that the rapes of her daughters that had started the rebellion would be repeated a thousand times more, ten thousand, a hundred thousand even, perpetuated into eternity upon all those who had risen to defense of their homeland.

He was dragged forward, his heels digging lines in the dust, away from the cottage that would be his mother's only pyre. Shuuichi clutched momentarily at the carven doorframe in fear, scrapes and another blow all he earned for his troubles. Kurama fought like a wildcat when they flipped over his mother's corpse, casually shoving their hands around until they could start finding where she'd kept the few precious baubles she had left. More legionaries leaked into the undefended building, moving around the two growling men that had claimed the empty, broken shell that once held Shiori of the Minamino clan.

Kurama lunged forward stupidly, hissing insults, but his wrists were grabbed and ripped down behind his back, where they could be crossed and tied. When he began struggling in earnest the man holding him spat something at his comrades. Seconds later, a sword appeared again at Shuuichi's gulping throat, just nicking the skin. Kurama closed his eyes and simply breathed, respecting his brother's life and his mother's modesty, not wanting to see her desecrated, not wanting to watch the little boy's eyes cross trying to see the threatening blade. He said nothing as coarse rope was looped around his neck and tied, far too tightly for comfort. Opening his eyes again, he saw the slack of the rope tied to Shuuichi's wrists leading up below his chin, a quick and efficient way to string them together. Kurama's eyes were hard and dignified as the two brothers were led off, their fate unknown and frightening.

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><p><strong>Glossary:<strong>

_Britannia_ - the province of Britannia, which covered all of today's Great Britain that was under Rome's control (including Ireland, Wales, England, and parts of the Scottish lowlands).

_Gladius _– A type of Roman sword, usual in the kit of a legionary; they were short and light, and mass-produced.

_Governor_ – More accurately _egatus Augusti pro praetor_ (literally: "envoy of the emperor - acting praetor"), this man was in charge of an imperial province (in this case, the province of Britannia).

_Legatus legionis _– Legatus legionis was a title awarded to legion commanders in Ancient Rome.

_Manduessedum_ – Actually, no one is sure where the final battle, the last stronghold, or even if it was at a stronghold, of Boudica's (here Mukuro's) uprising was. Manduessedum is a possible city, which I chose because it has a name.

_Pilum_ – A type of Roman spear, usual in the kit of a legionary, which was designed to bend or break on impact, so no enemy could throw it back or use it against the Roman.

_Helmet, _or_ Galea_ - Many of the helmets Roman soldiers wore had plumes, usually made with horsehair, though not always.


	2. Castor and Pollux

**A Note on the Chapter Title:** Castor and Pollux (known as Polydeuces to the Greeks) were Gods and twin brothers who were almost always worshiped together.

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><p><strong>Castor and Pollux<strong>

.

"We've crushed them, General, simply crushed them."

Hiei grunted rudely. "We lost the queen," he responded after a moment, knowing Butajiri would want more than a snort.

Butajiri sneered, the effect repulsive on the stocky jowls of his face. He and Hiei began to discuss how best to select the most beautiful captives from the throngs of new slaves being dragged out of the smoke blanketing Manduessedum, Hiei's mind barely bent to the problem.

Butajiri was a typical Roman Governor: cruel, avaricious, self-indulgent, he took this post away from Rome for a few years only to grow fat on the meat of the Britons. It was a usual practice. Roman moneylenders were quick to lend to nobles likely to be given a province, since only the just and fair-minded, which were few in the aristocracy, returned to Rome with a mere twice their original revenue. If a nobleman was on the cusp of bankruptcy, it was traditional to ask for and be given a province, as Hiei well knew from the sheer number of times his father had had to make that humiliating request. Even an Emperor like Karasu would grant such a thing, so long as the noble was in his favor. If he were not, then the Emperor could refuse, which was a sign that there was no hope of mollifying him. You were a walking corpse already.

As for Hiei's part, he knew why Butajiri in particular had been sent to Britannia. Along with the three spies who couldn't be expelled from Hiei's personal entourage, Butajiri was sent to watch Hiei, to account to the Emperor Hiei's doings, one way or another. If Hiei wasn't careful, Butajiri could use his reports to play up victories until the Emperor was jealous; he could send unpatriotic conversations, true or fabricated, so the Emperor became convinced Hiei was disloyal; he could even, in a pinch, pretend that Hiei had political interests in the power games played back at Rome that could easily get Hiei killed. There were a thousand things Butajiri could do, so it paid for the normally monosyllabic General to make an effort, and keep Butajiri happy.

In off moments, when Butajiri was creeping in with his retinue after a battle had gone well, swelled up with the vicarious goodwill of the men, Hiei pitied the ugly aristocrat. Butajiri enjoyed the depravities of the Emperor Karasu's court to the fullest, which made Hiei reel with distaste, but he'd enjoyed them too well. Soon, Emperor Karasu, ever paranoid, would decide Butajiri was a threat or an annoyance, and on that day the man would face an ignoble death. It had happened countless times before. Beyond the small circle of the Emperor's trusted associates, those who showed themselves to be too talented, too rapturous, too extreme, too unbending, or in excess of any characteristic that the Emperor disliked, quickly found their bodies carted away from the bottom of the Tarpeian Rock, execution ground for traitors, and their families in disgrace.

Hiei despised Butajiri's idiocy and dissolute lifestyle, but he didn't envy him his approaching death. Butajiri hadn't realized yet; he would soon. Hiei just hoped that the waddling toad had that particular epiphany well after he made his report to the Emperor on Hiei. The last thing the General needed was Butajiri reporting with the hope of ingratiating himself with their reigning monarch, or of distracting the Emperor's attention from Butajiri to Hiei himself.

Idly, the conversation came to a conclusion, Butajiri rubbing his meaty hands in joy and Hiei stiff and unresponsive. Soon, runners were sent to spread the word through the centurions (who would quickly spread it through the rank and file) that fat pouches of silver awaited any man who found and presented a slave of uncommon beauty, fit for the Emperor's bed.

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><p>The man holding Kurama looked smug, despite the thrice-bitten skin of his hands (Kurama's work) and the bruises from his quarrel with the other Roman soldiers. Kurama was determined to ignore him. His eyes, beyond his control, fixed on Shuuichi, who huddled in sight with a man fastening manacles to his wrists and a collar to his neck. The boy glanced continuously back at his brother, eyes bright with the tears that dribbled down his already salt-stained cheeks.<p>

Shuuichi sniffed, and Kurama winced in sympathy when the man fixing the collar on, his task completed, boxed the little boy's ears. Another child behind Shuuichi was attached via his manacles to the back of Shuuichi's collar, forming a metal version of the ropes that had been used to pacify the two brothers earlier. Kurama's green eyes closed momentarily, in pain and heartache. He was suspicious, but he couldn't, no matter how he puzzled, understand what had happened.

When Shuuichi and he were dragged through the battered ruins of the eastern cart gate, a man in better gear than his three captors had stopped and told them something. The three had saluted, convincing Kurama they were addressing one of their putrid officers, and then immediately afterward the legionary who stood beside Kurama now, his thick brows lowering in thought, had turned and run his eyes over Kurama speculatively in a way Kurama hadn't liked. The three men had fought, exchanging blows, and now here Kurama stood, in a long line of other soldiers with one, two, or even three captives, most of the captives women and good-looking and most of the soldiers sullen and greedy.

Kurama stared imperiously around the long, sloping hill the queue climbed, blood and the corpses of tribesmen turning the soil to mud, the legionaries already cleared and buried. The grass was gone, horses and carts and stomping boots having ground the sacred earth down, saturated and crushed it with Roman arrogance. _Artio will punish them for their pride,_ Kurama thought. He counseled himself to let the capricious forest goddess do her work with the divine timing the Druids so often bemoaned. She had not come yet, however, to minister to her chosen people, and Kurama grew impatient; and Camulos, the war god, had forsaken the Britons entirely. _Or been bested by the Roman Gods_, Kurama added disloyally. Kurama knew their strange names from the tongues of travelers, but he could not pronounce them.

All around him soldiers marched with the sun glinting on their armor, captives shrieked and fell to the mud, corpses lay in congealed blood, the world transformed into a mad raucous thing. He debated how he would obtain the gold to offer at a sanctuary, running fantasies of giving every Roman he saw to the Druids for sacrifice, thus appeasing the Gods with the blood he himself had not spilt for his clan. He was so entranced by it the line bled away, and he was at the top before he knew it.

He looked forward, his steady gaze meeting bitter red eyes that held his caustically. When Kurama didn't look away after a moment, the strangely petite man seated before him—his hard but oddly childish face clean-shaven, with black hair (but for a curling white starburst in the front) spiked into a tumble above his head—snorted in something that seemed like approval. The corpulent bastard seated next to him, his fingers dripping with jeweled rings, addressed the brutish legionary who had led Kurama here excitedly.

Kurama fought when they started stripping his clothes off with hands and daggers, but curiously, they didn't strike him. The wind was chill once he was naked and goosebumped before them, cold air whistling around him with no barrier. He was too frigid to struggle again when they turned him this way and that, fondled him and bent him over, examined his teeth as though he were a horse for market. He didn't look into their eyes. He didn't want to see the possessive stares, the sneers. He knew well enough that these Roman pigs viewed him as something far less than a soon-to-be man. For a heartbreaking moment, Kurama realized that as a slave in the land of the Romans, he and Shuuichi may never have the rites that inducted a boy to the tribe as a man and warrior, or craftsman. For Kurama, the rites were but a season away.

The fat one grinned, showing gold teeth, and nodded. Without being given back his clothes, Kurama was led away between two soldiers with gruff grips on his arms, naked and half-frozen. He looked over his shoulder one last time to see Shuuichi, the boy's round face turned up and his eyes fixed on the top of this hill: on Kurama. Shuuichi watched his brother even as the chain line began to move, both running starving eyes over each other with the absolute knowledge that this might be the last time they ever laid eyes on their brother again.

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><p><strong>Glossary:<strong>

_Butajiri was a typical Roman Governor_ – This is historically accurate, for the most part. At one sensational trial, Cicero rebuked in his courtroom orations (he was an Ancient Roman statesman, writer and lawyer, a contemporary of Julius Caesar) during the period of Roman history right before this, the Late Republic, those who used their governorship to gain gross profits (which, of course, most of them did). The trial I'm speaking of ended with one noble governor convicted for his abuses, monetary and otherwise, of the men and women of his province to fill his own pockets. Of course, he stepped over the line in a province rich enough to hire Cicero, the best attorney of his time, and happened to be particularly thick about hiding his deceptions. Most governors who engaged in similar widespread corruptions were never prosecuted, or never prosecuted successfully. Most historical evidence points to the idea that corruption was the rule in provinces (and many other governmental institutions in Rome), not the exception.

_Tarpeian Rock – _The execution ground for traitors, a truly ignoble place to meet one's death, this was a giant cliff which a "traitor" (who, through the history of Rome, could just as easily be someone who had soured an Emperor's temper) was tossed off of, onto the jagged rocks far below.

_Centurions_ – "A professional officer of the Roman army," according to Wikipedia. Most commanded 83 men.

_Artio_ – "Bear," a Celtic forest goddess.

_Camulos_ – A war god worshipped in Ancient Britannia and Ancient Gaul (England and France, respectively).

_Druids/Gold/Sacrifices/Sanctuaries_ – In Ancient Britannia and Gaul, Druidism was the religion followed, and it had little to do with what one might call "neo-druidism", and the ideas of druids people carry today. That said, I can't go into the full religion in this footnote. There were actually sacred groves, which we know little about; but there were also permanent sanctuaries, including ones where gold was given and/or human sacrifices were carried out, depending on the sanctuary. And to touch the gold of, let alone steal from, a sanctuary was something no Gallic or Briton man, woman or child would ever do, as Caesar commented.

_The rites of manhood_ – Modern historians don't know too too much about these rites, but we do know they existed, and were probably different from tribe to tribe.

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><p><strong>To Learn More:<strong>

If you'd like to know more about the time period, the two books I'm using for Celtic reference are "The World of the Celts" by Simon James, and "The Ancient Celts," by Barry Cunliffe. For Roman times, I'm using a lot of historical sources that would probably bore you guys to death (including Caesar's "Gallic Wars," Cicero's "On Divination, On Friendship, On Old Age, " Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations," selections from works on Roman epigraphy [the study of inscriptions], and Suetonius, Polybius, Tacitus, Sallust, and Livy, as well as many others of the ancient Roman historians). I also went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and looked at the room of Augustus's house, and no, this wasn't for a class, this was for the story (I'm crazy), and of course went and saw some Ancient Roman statues and such there, and coins in a local museum that actually let me touch them, which was cool. I've also been watching Rome, and reading some modern historical works (like Anthony Everitt's "Cicero," "Spartacus and the Slave Wars: A Brief History with Documents," and "Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armor") and novels about Ancient Rome to see how others do it (including "Roma," by Steven Saylor, "The Gods of War," by Conn Iggulden, and "Imperium," by Robert Harris). If you just like the Ancient World in general, I suggest the book "The Persian Boy," by Mary Renault. It's Ancient Persia/Greece, not Ancient Rome/Gaul/Britannia, but it's still an amazing book. I've also heard good things about "I, Claudius" and "The October Horse" et al. by Colleen McCullough, both of which I'm about to start reading.

Thanks for reading all of this! You rock.


	3. Angerona

**A Note on the Chapter Title:** Angerona - goddess who relieved people from pain and sorrow.

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><p>The bathhouse was comprised of a series of hastily erected plank buildings, badly outfitted against Britannia's winters, which meandered up a sloping hill overlooking the rest of the city. Londinium was sodden with snow and ice, and from the bathhouse's height, it looked ragged. The burnt-out husks of buildings were being torn down and rebuilt everywhere Kurama could see by gangs of slaves and bellowing workmen, the air still reeking of smoke and ash. Kurama was proud of Mukuro, their late leader, for destroying so great a city.<p>

His captors seemed belligerent about the cold, especially their short general. Kurama wondered if that was the source of their victories, the fire in their blood. It had to be fire: this was not a particularly harsh winter, though the soldiers muttered and swore and beat their captives to make up for it. Kurama wondered if the beatings kept the slavers warm, and if that was why they happened so often. The thought was quickly quelled. It brought the Romans joy, that's why they did it; it pleased them.

The wooden prows of the Roman triremes collecting along the River Tamesas bobbed lethargically; even from this distance, the cursing of Roman soldiers and sailors eager to reach the mainland and then march to their far-off country echoed over the calling gulls. The distant reverberations of drums for the galley slaves beat incessantly from the holds of the long, thin boats, with oars like the legs of an insect dipping and rising below square grey sails, belled out with a brisk wind.

Kurama watched them, reviling his own awe, unused to boats so large. They were nothing like the skiffs he'd seen men use for fishing. Kurama had never been on a boat—all of his own fishing had been done in lakes or on the seashore, up to his waist in the bracing water, casting the weighted ends of his self-woven nets into the brine and dragging it back, reeling in his catch of crabs and eels, fish and whelks, whatever he happened to have caught.

Kurama's breath eased out as he was overwhelmed by memories. The song of the thrushes and the chirruping skylarks that marked the summers in Kurama's thatch cottage couldn't be heard here. Memories of home were dismal, and to distract his thoughts Kurama studied a plover that clung to the top of the bath's walls, its brown and tan feathers fluffed against the cold.

Kurama examined his breath as it fogged from his mouth. Yet again he had been bathed. Yet again the warm greasy oil had been slathered over his body and scraped off, and yet again balms were massaged into his skin. Kurama couldn't understand it. His hair was carefully and routinely cleaned, brushed, and trimmed, and treated with oils that made it curl and shine, thick and lustrous when he looked into one of their cursed mirrors. The soft fuzz of a man's beard he'd been trying to cultivate had been shaved over and over again until there was no trace of hair. Other parts of him had been slicked and run over with a straight razor as well, such as his legs and arms, and a woman who spoke no Celtic daily plucked stray hairs from his eyebrow, and, embarrassingly and painfully, from his nether region, examining him to make sure there were none and then coating his lips, sac, and cock with lotion. Kurama endured the humiliation with a tight jaw.

His fingernails were trimmed with a tiny metal instrument like a sheep's shear, and a rough stone was used to grind them down into a beautiful curve that he stared at, fascinated, whenever he moved his hand. He was fed regularly and well. Already, the starvation was stemmed off and his ribs were disappearing under soft new fat and, oddly, muscle. He was forced to run in circles inside and perform bizarre exercises every day, probably to keep the rich food from making him pudgy, and unlike the others he did this with alacrity, even worked at them when nothing had been ordered. He wanted to be fit—fit to fight, fit to plan, fit to run. He and the others that had been taken from that long line of soldiers and captives were treated like royalty, or royal children at least: forced to wash and clean, pick their teeth and their nails. None of them were touched, though Kurama had seen women and children, even men raped by the soldiers, the slavers.

Why was he not in pens with the rest, waiting for the ships that would carry them to Gaul, the slave lines that would march them on to Rome? Kurama knew of Gaul, though he had never been there. He wondered how far it would be to Rome. He wondered many other things as well.

Most of the others who had been chosen seemed relieved to be away from the dismal slave pens and out of the cold. The women were over on the other side of the bathhouse's yard, playing idly with the jewelry and pretty silks they'd been dressed in and chattering softly. The men lounged, too, pleased with the way they looked now in mirrors, but Kurama was not fooled. He knew the Romans wouldn't give them this for nothing. He had resigned himself to fate, but he would not suffer it quietly. Given half a chance, he would throw himself into a method for escape—but he could not escape without Shuuichi, and he was given much less than half a chance. He hadn't clapped eyes on his brother in weeks. Knowing that anything could happen to his last remaining relative made him anxious and tense, and he was under no illusions. They might not want him bruised, but Kurama saw that undue attention was paid to his loin, and he was far too clever not to reach the right conclusion.

They would be sold to someone high up, a leader of some sort. This person would need to be rich and powerful for the bastard Generals to take a whole line of the best slaves and ready them for him. Kurama thought that for there to be so many, this man must be cruel, and wasteful. The prospect of cruelty frightened Kurama—the prospect of waste terrified him. To have so many, it was clear that any who disappointed would be gotten rid of. How that would happen, precisely, was a mystery, which opened enough possibilities that Kurama remained in a constant state of dread, dread that lay over his eyelids and invaded his head, the seat of his power, befuddling it.

Kurama was determined to learn their language, and just as determined not to let on he was picking it up. One of the others chosen knew a little Latin, and Kurama had grimly drained him of all useful knowledge and bundled it up for himself, listening silently to any words the soldiers said, putting them aside for later use. Each meaning discovered was a triumph, each new word a puzzle. They treated him like a hare, easy to catch, easy to kill, easy to skin; in reality, he was a fox. A druid had once called him that—little fox—and Kurama rather liked the name. So, like the fox, cleverest of the forest, he would bide his time, even into the gates of Rome if he had to. Soon enough, he would be free.

He was not the only one who'd noticed something wrong. Kurama traded looks yet again with the brooding grey eyes of the handsome young warrior who lounged against the bathhouse wall across the courtyard, under the skeleton of a young tree. Kurama was polite to the others, though he felt distanced from them. This man was not. When no one who knew their language was around, he frequently berated the men for rolling over like hounds for a belly itching, and insulted the women with far worse. Kurama hardly liked him—he considered him a patriotic fool—but Kurama was also aware of the searing in his belly, what he called a fox's admiration for a wolf. It was a turn of phrase to distance himself from the burning in his stomach when he saw other men, agreeably bodied and in control. It was the reason he avoided service to the druidic orders, which would have seemed natural for one of his build and intelligence, and favored the warrior class. Wolves were unendingly pleasing to Kurama, while women, though he often loved them for their company or their minds, were not. When he thought about it, and he rarely did, Kurama had decided long ago that it was no matter. His love of men was just one more quirk that separated him from his surroundings, one more eccentricity in an already eccentric lad.

Kurama realized he was staring at the man, and immediately turned away and began strolling along the wall, eyes on the dead vegetation of a winter garden and mind running mad fantasies fueled by memories of the man being plucked, images he held close to his heart.

Kurama looked up from the trailing vine he was fingering when the gate opened to the side and the two generals entered, the short and surly one leading and the fat one behind, leering at them with pig eyes. Kurama tensed, and the legionaries who'd been guarding them stood to immediate attention.

The self-important traitor (as Kurama knew her) who translated for the prisoners waddled in with them, a round old woman who rarely deigned to speak to her countrymen if it wasn't a demand barked in a bad accent. The little general growled something and she ordered them to line up, looking grim. Soldiers were coming in after the generals and Kurama tensed quietly, feeling like a jackdaw fretting as crows took its nest. He lined up with the rest, eyes bright as he watched the two generals searchingly, knowing that the order would come from them.

The short general asked something, clearly unhappy. "Who is the prisoner called Zeru?" the translator repeated brusquely, a look on her face like she was shoveling knee-deep in an old wastepit.

There was a moment of shuffling silence, and then the young warrior, eyes proud, stepped forward.

"I am Zeru."

The woman repeated this to the generals in their own language. The fat general grinned and the other nodded grimly. Zeru got one punch in before he was restrained, five big legionaries leaping into the fray to subdue him. Zeru snarled, but they just grinned at him.

The short General spoke in a flurry, the woman attempting to keep up with him.

"The slave Zeru of the Iceni people has been caught conspiring against the Roman Empire with the cook Lara, and hoarding weapons. He will be crippled, and then sold at the market. A similar fate awaits any man or woman who follows in his footsteps."

The warrior reared up at the word 'crippled,' but it was too late. Zeru's eyes raced and he shouted insults, but his fine pants were being peeled off.

Kurama made himself watch, forcing his eyes to remain on the man Zeru's face as it contorted in fearful agony. It was done bluntly, quickly, and unfeelingly, his Achilles tendon severed in both legs with all the ceremony of a chicken's neck being wrung, or a lamb being slaughtered for the table. The repeated bite of the blade, the screaming, thrashing man, the blood that gushed out and then stopped when a brazier was brought over and the wound cauterized, imprinted themselves in Kurama's brain.

They are not men, Kurama thought hollowly, meeting the short general's eyes coldly. Zeru was dragged away from the bloodstained courtyard, weeping like a child, the air reeking of burnt flesh. He would never walk again.

* * *

><p><strong>Glossary:<strong>

_Londinium_ – Londinium stood where modern London stands today, though at that point it was still only a small city, an outpost for Rome. Londinium was destroyed, as were most of the Roman outposts, cities, and towns, during the warrior woman Boudica's uprising. By the way, since I haven't gone into it, the uprising started because Roman officials denied Boudica's right to her throne and raped her daughters. In retaliation, Boudica led a rebellion that almost made the Emperor Nero pull all troops out of Britannia, modern day England. It was unsuccessful, but very cool regardless.

_Triremes_ – These were ancient warships, galleys, and common during this period in Rome, Greece, and other ancient societies.

_River Tamesas_ – The Thames, as it's known today.

_Service to the druidic orders_ – Kurama is too old and not of noble blood, so he couldn't become a druid, but he could certainly work as a servant for one, which would have granted him a place of respect.

_Jackdaw_ – An English bird that's rather like a magpie or crow in its habits and appearance.

_Iceni people_ – The Iceni were a large and powerful tribe in Ancient Britannia.


	4. Abeona

**A Note on the Chapter Title:** Abeona - a goddess who protected children the first time they left their parents' home, safeguarding their first steps alone.

Kurama learned many seasons later that Zeru lived through the laming, raving and hallucinating on the back of a cart. He overcame the illness, though it burnt his body to a husk, and was sold to a gem cutter in Rome. He worked the wheels there to polish the jeweler's stones. Eventually, his feet were cut off, leaving him alive, with his ankles wrapped to hide the stumps. He tried to steal once, and for the crime his nose was lopped off, leaving a gaping chasm in his once-handsome face. Still he lived.

At that point Kurama had no more pity to give to Zeru, however. His heart had been wrung dry, the last drop suckled out by greedy lips years before.

* * *

><p>Slaves clung to the mud around him, fighting whips and brusque handling, praying in lilting Celtic tongues. One woman scooped the slime of the Tamesas into her two palms and ate it, sucking the lines in her fingers. Kurama understood. She wanted the earth of her homeland inside her, to keep with her forever, to grant her strength and courage in her captivity. Moments later a legionary forced her through the brackish water and over the lip of the trireme, and Kurama looked away.<p>

The others designated for the rich customer exchanged frightened glances, leaning into each other imperceptibly for warmth and comfort. Even the dullest sensed the precipice of displacement they faced and the frightening journey ahead. The clothing they wore today was simple leather, chosen so the fine silks couldn't be destroyed by the channel's waves. Kurama assumed that any callouses they gained would be buffed, grated and powdered down on the other side, and nearly began to vibrate with impatience. His eyes roved over the white crests of waves and the dots and curves of the gulls that circled high above, cocking his ear to their eerie screeches. He leaned back against the ship's warped, salt-bleached wood, and watched the last strands of morning fog curl above the river basin.

Home, he thought, a clumsy shudder running up his spine. He might never see it again; might never taste this salt, mud and wet, the rotting fish of whelk-dotted shores at low tide. He wondered whether the horses would prance in Rome; whether the does and fawns would stand poised with graceful fear before the hunters; whether the crows sidled and cackled with the same mysterious powers; whether the wildflowers would peek their heads out each spring with such colorful pride, like a chick grown finally to a rooster. He didn't want them to. He wanted the rolling heather a day's walk from his cottage to be the most beautiful thing in the known world, as he suspected it was. He didn't want his eye turned by gauche Roman frippery.

Blaming his itching tears on the strong salt winds, he looked away, and didn't protest when he was led down to the hold and chained away from the galley slaves.

The trip was a misery. The boat rocked and swung with little rhythm, leaping up over a wave only to come crashing down in a spray of foam, the beat of the rowing drums and the lamps that swung crazily on iron chains casting demonic shadows over faces until no features looked human, and all was unrecognizable. Kurama curled up, ill as though he'd eaten spoiled meat; sure spirits, which howled even now with the voice of the wind and caressed and slapped him with cold wet fingers, had abducted him. His eyes rolled deliriously, the jerking of the boat tipping him over and nearly ripping his arms out of his sockets as he reached the end of his chain. A few repeated pulls of that sort, and Kurama lost consciousness, entering a feverish world of beating drums and dancing goblins, where dark was light and light was dark, all upside down and inside out and then, finally, he awoke to a bucket of freezing salt water that left him gasping and burning. It brought him back to himself enough to climb a ladder at the urging of a Roman, blinking and shivery as he rose through the square entrance to the hold and closed his eyes for a moment, scared. When he opened his eyes he saw before him, face shaken, a shore that looked remarkably like the one they'd left behind.

For a second his heart soared, thinking they'd changed course and were back at the land of the Britons. The legionaries smiled, however, and in moments he knew the truth. He was in a Gallic harbor, looking at an unknown land. The gulls that screeched, the smell of rotting fish, and the hard wind that stank of salt and whipped his tunic up into his face, however, broke his heart.


	5. Quirinus

**A Note on the Chapter Title:** Quirinus — Romulus, the founder of Rome, was deified as Quirinus after his death. Quirinus was a war god and a god of the Roman people and state.

* * *

><p>Kurama's countrymen were easy to see beyond the iron bars of the rocking, wood-bellied cage he was confined to. They stumbled with bloody feet wrapped in rags, the soil of the Gallic lowlands clinging to their body. Many had stuffed herbs, tatters of cloth, soft loam, leaves, whatever they could find into the gaps between manacles and flesh. Their faces, thin and starved at the first, were thinning further, the hard march, ill usage, and scant rations felt to the very marrow of their bones. Almost daily a pregnant woman or a too-young child collapsed: if the legionaries couldn't rouse them, they were given the culling blow and thrown into a ditch, sans burial rites of any kind.<p>

Kurama was still primped and fattened and oiled, tended to like a fine young colt they prepared for market day. He saw the hate-filled glances of the other Celts; heard their soft jeering when the same mute woman who'd tended to him in Londinium undressed him and plucked him clean. It made his soul bleed, but he endured it, keeping his chin straight and his shining green eyes level. He looked so like a noble chieftain, a venerable warrior, that in other circumstances they would have respected him. Kurama understood: it is hard to see a kinsman in a shaven boy whose wild hair has been tamed and trimmed to ever-softening crimson curls, forced from the traditional Celtic dreadlocks.

The Gauls came to see them as the army and captives wound along straight Roman roads, making a headless writhing snake of people and horses. In the upper regions of Gaul, there was pity or apathy on the watchers' faces. Taunts had been kept to a minimum once the coast, which Britons often plundered when food was scarce, was cleared. The farther south they travelled, however, the more the faces changed. Here in the area the legionaries called Province, the sight of Roman airs were common. Kurama was shocked to see base corruptions of Celtic hairstyles mixed with shaven faces; grown men with cheeks as smooth as a girl's. Kurama was offended, and looked away, though he'd learned to watch when he heard the taunting voices of little boys, who were apt to throw stones or rotting things at the passing slaves. One stone hit a legionary, and Kurama thought the boy would be killed before his father, a rich merchant, intervened, groveling and offering a handful of hard-won gold coins.

Kurama watched the boy released and the father ushering him away, already scolding him lowly in an odd mix of Latin and his tribal tongue. Thinking of Shuuichi's unknown fate, Kurama couldn't overcome the disdain that washed over him, like one of the Romans' noxious herbal baths.

When Kurama was captured, all those months ago, it had been during the final legs of winter's power. Now, the last patches of ice were liquefying, the rivers and streams of Gaul swollen with snowmelt. The first flowers were peeking out from their seeds only to be trodden under marching feet, and the woods rang with returning songbirds in the grey mornings Kurama spent curled in the corner of his cell, arising from the Egyptian cotton he'd been provided with to listen to the comely chirrups.

Then, without fail, he walked around his narrow prison (benches, bedding, and chamber pot) and conjured up images of his mother stirring a fine stew of turnips and potatoes, the cooked meat of a hare, and forest herbs, thick with cream and flour and smelling like all of nature's bounty was in the pot. In his memory, which was still fresh in those days, Shiori would look up and smile when he came in sweating from his day in the fields and laugh at his weariness, banishing it. The natural light faded from his mind, sunset echoes dancing on the neat onion whitewash covering the wattle and daub sides of their cottage, a sweet little building that could barely hold the three of them and their faithful dog, Briar. Shuuichi would return with the hound from shepherding their flock, all of whom, ram and ewe alike, had been slaughtered, stolen, or sold in the long, fruitless war.

Simple days. Happy days. They were over, and once the sun rose, and the soft magic of daybreak faded into the ugly clarity of morning, they were banished from Kurama's mind. The march stirred then, slave children crying as they awakened to whips and labor and unfamiliar surroundings. In those dawns, though, everything seemed closer and more real, more terrible, and his loss felt so great he thought he would die of it. It was his fate to live, however.

The mountains, when they came upon them, were bold ink strokes against the sky, seeming to go up and on forever, wreathed by clouds: but they were as cruel as they were beautiful. Kurama, General Hiei and all the captives and legionaries felt the closeness of Rome. The snow still lingered in the passages that would truck the army, but after a few days of indecision the orders were given, and a great confusion of legionaries and their horses started forward, wheeling, cart horses and warhorses alike called in to break the snow.

Kurama was dragged from his cage and lashed to a horse, a dun mare with a world-weary step. Being the son of a peasant, Kurama could barely ride, and jostled and jarred along miserably, not knowing how to keep his heels down or how to sit in the saddle. Even for plowing his family had had an ox, Cornu, long since sold. He slipped and bumped this way and that, his hands bound before him, until his ass, his calves, and his thighs were sore, strained and red, while the icy winds of the mountaintops plucked at him and chapped his skin, reddening his face, the glare off the snow burning his skin. He felt shamed, to burn and peel like a lily-fingered Latin noble, but there was little he could do. He felt some vindication when his keepers checked him, day after day, and clucked to each other over the work that would have to be done on the other side of the mountain to undo what the travel had done. They always left him tied to his horse in the end, a horse whose name he did not know, and didn't want to know, since it would be in Latin and he was now learning so little new of it that he was frustrated by its very thought.

From his vantage point, he saw the long drop down the side of the mountain, and he saw men and beasts fall prey to it. A heavyset man tripped at the top of a slave line, and in an instant twenty people had been dragged to their deaths, so abruptly that many never had time to scream. Kurama pitied them. Death was good, but to die of a fall, far from home, in enemy hands, was dishonorable.

Kurama began to wake up at night in a cold sweat, overwhelmed with images of those he had seen die. He went back to sleep afterwards, mostly, always with the sense that he was skirting something. He was, too: he never watched his mother's death. That was kept in a box in his heart, wound over tightly with twine. When the memory threatened to come back, he pictured wrapping more and more string around it, good taut spun rope, until it couldn't open.

When the path they followed into the mountain finally turned down, and Kurama was afraid of sliding over the horse's head instead of off its hind, the legionaries rejoiced, but Kurama did not. Wild plans for escape filled his head, even as they passed the snows and trotted down until the ground was level, rich with blankets of green moss and merry streams. The scraggly pines of the mountaintop were replaced with true forests, which quickly shrank and thinned into farmland, neat rows where the occasional farmer plowed or tilled or planted his spring seed and grain.

Sometimes dirty peasant children, looking no thicker or better fed than the slaves in the line, scratched themselves watching the long miserable river of limping, footsore slaves and soldiers wind through the fearfully straight roads, which could only lead to one place. Kurama never knew when they passed into Italy, for of course, all of this was Rome to him. He saw prosperous towns and impoverished shacks and looked upon them with equal hate. He was moved back to a cage (he wasn't sorry to see the end of his riding) with a blanket thrown over it so he couldn't incur any more damage from the sun. Much of his journey after that was spent in darkness, which quickly became maddening.

He couldn't complain, however. It would have been weak, with children no older than six forced to trudge all these miles on their own two feet. He paced, cursed the horses that pulled his pen, and spent his time repeating the new words he'd learned in Latin to himself, hoping to lodge them in his memory and perfect pronunciation. The cloth dulled sound and everything smelt of sweat, leather, chamber pot and horses. He was thus unprepared (though he'd heard the low moans of pain from his countrymen) when someone, cruelly or kindly he could not at first tell, ripped off the tarp.

Kurama gawked. He gaped. In fact, his eyes were round as coins. The seven hills that lay spread before him like a whore with her legs open, like an anthill, teeming with people, held more humanity than Kurama had ever seen in all the rest of his life put together. There was no section of road or ledge that wasn't moving with man and beast, and the massive marble walls of each separate section, the villas and houses, the slums and markets that leaked out beyond the gates and down into the swamps between each hill, they all astounded him.

He'd heard the noise increasing to a dull roar, smelt the stench of what he hadn't recognized as the odor of unwashed millions and their animals, of melding aromas of foods and spices and incense from every corner of the known world, of the rank rich stink of tightly-packed humanity, but that hadn't prepared him for the shining marble domes of Pompey's theater, the hoards of birds that wheeled above the rooftops in great brown clouds, or the influx of travelers on foot, on horse- or donkey-back, on ornate pavilions carried by strong-armed groups of slaves, or in farmer's carts.

Noble and common, rich and poor, of every race of man that Kurama thought could exist in all the world, they ran or jogged or walked or rested or road as per their liking, away from, towards, and around the greatest city of all the world, Rome, the heart of an Empire. The masses parted around and were pushed and jostled to the side before the long line of cheerful legionaries and weary, wide-eyed slaves. Kurama covered his head and thought he would be sick, but soon looked up again seconds afterward to take more in. It was an overload of the senses after the shapeless sweating darkness of the tarp.

He'd forgotten to look for the reason his tarp had been removed. Kurama was so flabbergasted by the panorama before him that he barely struggled when two legionaries who had opened the door behind him dragged Kurama from the cage, forcing him to trip on the wooden lip of the doorway. The three men, Kurama putting up a slowly increasing fight, wound through all the city-goers, secreting Kurama off towards the high white walls of a villa they were passing, overrun with flowering creepers. Overwhelmed, Kurama knew nothing more than that Mukuro must have been mad, simply mad, to challenge the great lolling mob of Rome.


	6. Mars

**A Note on the Chapter Title: **Mars was the Roman god of war.

* * *

><p>The white expanse of the villa's walls was now behind him, though Kurama, in the midst of his struggles, had never gotten a good look at it. He remembered trellises, and shy spring flowers, but little more. Kurama was resisting his captors with single-minded bitterness by this point, frightened of the men dragging him forward through a thick stone archway and out into a courtyard, shaking him violently by his collar when he tripped.<p>

Once inside, Kurama paused in his struggles, allowing them to pull him forward, stumbling, a few steps so he could take in his lavish surroundings. There was an entrance to a stable along the left hand wall, with horse scent and the stamping of hooves and whickering of the great beasts easily heard echoing out through the open doorway and square windows cut into the wooden walls.

Servants paused from their work in the courtyard, a man carrying a huge bowl of fruit staring, a woman who'd been scrubbing a mosaic that led into the main house with a rag she still had dipped into a big wooden basin brimming with soapy water, distracted for a moment by the entrance of Kurama, looking up curiously at the newcomers.

The house itself was an ornate monster of a thing, typically Roman with arching marble and beautiful polished stone, crisscrossed with gardens blooming with flowers that made Kurama's eyes widen, having never seen such well-tended beauty before, all vibrant colors, some with delicate fluted tops and others appearing to be a type of rose, though they looked nothing like the little primroses Kurama's mother had tended when she was still alive. There was nothing growing on the impressive walls of the house, though, which loomed stately and frightening over Kurama's head.

A high, fluting voice halted the three embattled men in their tracks. By now, after all these months, Kurama could understand the gist of what was said.

"Halt! Why do you treat the poor boy this way? Leave him be."

One of the soldiers jerked Kurama brusquely under the guise of checking the rope they'd cinched over his hands, making Kurama double over in pain before he could get a good look at the woman who'd taken to his cause. The other legionary answered deferentially, "Begging your pardon, domina, but all these Northmen are cowardly trash." Kurama surmised the gist of what the lanky bastard said, knowing there was an adjective he hadn't caught before trash, and wondering what domina meant. "This is the slave your brother sent word of."

"I guessed as much," the woman said, still polite, but pained, thinking very little of these two soldiers. Kurama smirked to himself as the two honor-less dogs tripped over themselves to apologize to her. Unfortunately, the one who had shaken him noticed, and when Kurama was ushered towards the woman, a petite thing with blue hair feathered behind her neck and big red eyes, he found himself suddenly falling with a squawk to the cut stones of the courtyard, which he struck painfully, his jaw clacking as it hit stone. He moaned, bleeding and curling in pain, hearing some of the servants who'd been watching his performance chuckle.

Seconds later, soft hands, tiny as those on a girl's doll, touched his chin and helped him up. He looked into the concerned eyes gratefully.

"Your services are no longer needed."

"But domina, it isn't safe to be around one of them alone," the second man pleaded.

"Nonsense, he won't hurt me. Will you? Do you speak my language?" she inquired, looking down at him worriedly.

Kurama said nothing. Kindness or no, he wouldn't betray one of the few advantages he had to this woman so easily. He was trying to affect a look of bewilderment when a second voice, familiar and hated, broke through him.

"Of course he does," the short general stated, servants rushing forward to help him off his horse. "His guards tell me he practices Latin night and day; it can be heard clear as glass through the horse blanket we threw over his cage."

Kurama's sour look was answer enough.

"Sister," the general continued, "these men know better than you how to treat one of those Northern wolves. Take him to the cellar," Hiei instructed them. "Guard him. I'll have food brought down."

"Brother," the lady said reproachfully, "this boy is not a wild dog."

"No," he agreed, "not once we train him. Now come, greet me properly, Yukina. I tell you, the gods pissed on me all through that awful war."

Yukina didn't rise, or take her hands from where they rested gently against Kurama's cheek. "Oh, Hiei, I know you," she said fondly, and sadly. "You enjoy your soldiering far more than you let on."

_Hiei,_ Kurama thought, finally able to discern some meaning from the fast string of foreign words. _So that's his name._

Hiei grunted. "Against people who can fight, not those feckless Northern savages, in the interminable mud and ice. I just hope word comes from the senate soon that they've approved my triumph," he said sullenly. "You there, legionaries: you're dismissed. Follow your orders."

"Sir!" the two men barked, snapping to attention and saluting, the girl removing her hand and stepping back with a forlorn expression. Kurama was dragged down towards a doorway, head reeling with fear and all the words and ideas he hadn't caught from their long and quick conversation. He looked back to see Yukina embracing her brother shyly, heart turning to stone as he thought of his own little brother, and then the wooden hatch they'd pulled him into closed over his head, and he was in darkness.

It took some time of struggling and cursing before the second legionary, existing only in thumps and mutters in the gloom of the cellar, found a torch bracket on the wall and, removing its burden, felt his way tenderly up the ladder to the trap door leading outside. He left the boy to be forced to his knees in the brief light, his neck bent and held in place by the Roman's feet. The legionary had found a rough chair to sit on, and knowing how easy an escape attempt or attack would be in the darkness, used the pretext of touching him to keep Kurama subdued.

A small eternity passed for Kurama of kneeling cowed on chilly stone with the legionary's sandals crossed on his neck, and his hands still lashed behind his back, without enough light to see. It made Kurama feel as though he were entombed in a murky barrow, a chieftain's spirit holding him in thrall until he died under the weight. The second legionary came back with a lit torch flaring next to his face, spitting ash and sparks, and went around untying and lighting sticks from the fagots of them kept bundled along the western wall while chatting with his fellow soldier, until the usual shimmering firelight illuminated the long shelves full of fired terra cotta amphorae of oil; big barrels of root vegetables; milk pails brimming with fresh cream; the butchered corpses of animals; even dozens of eggs in an iron cask, crisscrossed with straw to keep them from cracking. Anything that could spoil was held down in the frigid air of the cellar, and with an extended household as large as Hiei Jaganshi's, scion of the patrician Jaganshi family, fresh provisions were in constant demand.

A few hours passed with raucous conversation between the first legionary, a bullish man who kept his weight on the heavy feet across Kurama's neck and left his face in shadow, and the second, a man whose sandy hair was turned ghostly by torchlight and skin unusually pale for a Roman's. Kurama slipped into agony, slowly, his muscles seizing from his miserable position under the legionary's leather-wrapped heel. The soldier shifted, sometimes thoughtlessly and sometimes to hear Kurama moan, chatting with his friend and, more suggestively, with the disapproving slaves who occasionally came down through the entrance that led into the house and collected meat or oil, vegetables or fruits, whatever was necessary for the midday meal in the process of being cooked.

Kurama didn't try to understand their prattle. He didn't want to know. He didn't want any part of those whoresons and their bastard language inside of him.

Finally, the influx of servants thinned out, then stopped altogether. The legionary subduing Kurama was stretching his legs and kicking Kurama in boredom when the cellar door opened and General Hiei came down the crude wooden stairs, a flabby Persian eunuch with his eyes outlined in kohl following behind him.

"Get up," Hiei ordered. The legionary pulled his feet back guiltily, saluted, and stood to attention. Hiei scowled when Kurama, his muscles so cramped he knew he'd scream if they moved him, stayed crouching, biting back groans when he tried to stretch his feet.

"Up, you little shit!" the legionary who'd been using him as a footrest barked, and kicked Kurama in the side, making him yell out in pain and flop over sideways, skidding. Still he couldn't get up, in an excess of agony. The soldier reached down and grabbed him by the hair, eager to please his general, and pulled him from the floor like that.

The pain was so intense tears leaked from Kurama's eyes, and he yowled breathlessly. The legionary, laughing, pushed Kurama forward, the eunuch cackling when Kurama tottered forward a few steps, and then leaned his shoulders against a nearby shelf to stay upright, sobbing in wet gasps at the excruciating agony in his legs. Suddenly, coarse but small hands were urging him forward. "Walk," Hiei said gruffly to Kurama, and Kurama did, belatedly.

It took nearly all of the octava hour to get Kurama walking again without limping. Kurama was dumbfounded by the General's patience. He even ordered the boy's bonds cut, after which Kurama, scuffing his wrists to get some feeling back into them, looked into Hiei's red eyes searchingly. Hiei wanted to look away, but didn't, glaring the boy down. The slaves and soldiers watching stood shocked, unused to seeing such gestures of kindness from the General.

Kurama found himself pushed through the sumptuous halls of the house after that, past curious slaves and soldiers and halls bedecked in white linen and mosaics of strange beasts with scaled skin or circular orange plumes around their head. They reached the inner halls, and then turned into the General's sleeping chambers, a lavish room with a canopied bed and rich Persian rugs overlapping the floor. There, Kurama was let go. He turned and backed up quickly until he reached the wall, then stayed plastered against the silk drapes with his hands behind his back, holding two fistfuls of cloth smoother than Kurama had known it could be woven. The sandy-haired legionary, who had been summoned with Kurama, and a burly slave had to pry him from his cower, delicately untangling his hands so as not to hurt the silk, and then yanking him before Hiei with significantly less care, who disrobed calmly in preparation. Kurama, perceiving what was about to happen, shouted a single, desperate _no_ in his own language and flung himself backwards against the holds of the two larger, stronger, and in the legionary's case better-trained men. His traveling clothes, a Roman-style tunic of linen in the last days of the journey, were stripped from him with no fanfare, just rending cloth, leaving him shrinking and bare, restrained by two men's arms.

The congeniality and kindness were gone. "There is an art to what I'm going to teach you tonight, slave. The sooner you learn it, the sooner these meetings between the two of us will end. Over the next few weeks, as they approve and arrange for my Triumph, I will be personally preparing you for his Imperial Highness. Oh, and for your sake, you must tell the Emperor when you meet him that you are a virgin. Act virginal. But believe me, slave, this is for your health that we do this—even I am not so cruel as to let the Emperor loose on a barbarian who knows not a slave's place."

"Please," Kurama begged throatily in the Latin tongue, "No." He shook his head bleakly. "Please."

Hiei looked at him, surprised, as though seeing him for the first time. There was a moment when pity condensed in Hiei's heart, and stayed his hand. The moment passed quickly, however, and yawning to show off his boredom, an old patrician trick, the caustic General instructed the two men restraining Kurama to put him against the bed and leave him. Kurama, the moment their hands were off him, leapt over the soft mattress, quick as a cornered hare.

They chased him—he ran, dodging to a corner to get them all on one side of the room and then streaking to the room's entrance, fully intending to run all the way back to Britannia, his cottage, Cornu, Shuuichi, Briar, and _Mother,_ all of whom he had the vague but urgent sense were waiting for him all that distance away. He found only that the door was locked, and that Hiei had seen his intention and was too close.

Kurama swung out, using all the skills he'd learned from boyhood brawls and warrior training, and smashed his knuckles into Hiei's face, leaving a red stripe and a flash of pain and disorientation that momentarily stunned the General.

Kurama ducked and feinted and hurled anything hard he could get his hands on at Hiei and his minions, breaking, in the end, a mirror, two vases, a bowl, and a chair Hiei had been fond of. They cornered him finally. There was brief excitement when Kurama tried to wriggle through the open window and the slave tackled him to the wall and pinned him roughly, yelling in his own language. A hanging Kurama's grasping hand found ripped from the stitches adjoining it to the wall and fluttered down over them like a canopy. Kurama deftly attempted to use it to his advantage, but at the last moment the hanging caught a gust of wind and wafted in a delicate curve to the left of the ruckus, ruining Kurama's opportunity for escape.

By that point, Hiei wasn't thinking of the dent Kurama's body had left in the plaster. He wasn't thinking of the bowl that had knocked his cheekbone with a painful clack and left a bruise, the scuff on the other side from Kurama's punch, or the loss of his chair. Hiei was burning cold with battlefield anger, which let him see clearly the road to Kurama's destruction. He grabbed the ripped curtain, tore a strip from it, and used it to tie a noose around Kurama's neck, instructing the soldier and servant to grab an arm and stand on a foot each so he could tighten it, brutally, until Kurama's breath was so loud they could all hear him straining.

At the edge of unconsciousness, when Kurama could fight no more, Hiei barked an order that Kurama was too fuzzed to understand and let out some of the taut length of cloth, allowing Kurama to breathe. They dragged him back to the bed bodily, snarling, when he made feeble motions toward the open window.

"You're lucky I can't have marks of torture on you, slave," Hiei panted, sweating and exhausted from his strenuous run around his room. The men were holding Kurama in place through brutal pressure on each shoulder and elbow, one on either side.

Hiei finished disrobing in jerks, letting his tunic fall onto the ground next to the shattered sepia pieces of the vase, all compassion and mercy momentarily purged from his soul. He advanced to lean forward just behind Kurama. Kurama's ass was bared by the position Hiei's subordinates had forced him into. Red hair, fanned on the sheets, rippled as Kurama jerked away. He mewled in pain when the servant and legionary's hands yanked him back, nearly dislocating his shoulders and breaking his arm.

Kurama glared tight-lipped over his shoulder, hatred and fear running through his veins like fire.

"Relax," Hiei snapped, winding the long tail of the noose around his hand, immune to the violence of this, immune to his own cruelty. "Or this will hurt worse."

"No understand," Kurama whispered desperately, before his voice rose in an agonized, offended shout.

Hiei had shoved a dry finger into Kurama, his other hand at the base of the noose, pulling. "That. Hurt. Pain. Have you done this before?"

"No understand," Kurama sobbed, and then his breath caught as the finger curled, Hiei's ire not yet cooled.

"With a man. Have you, I don't know, fucked, fornicated, had coitus with a man."

The legionary, who'd slept with quite a lot of whores and slaves in Gaul and Britannia, supplied a few slang words. Kurama glared poisonously when he understood.

"Yes…" he said, voice soft with hatred, his accent made worse by stress and fear.

Hiei quirked an eyebrow. "Good. But this is not sex, this is to teach you your place. You must learn to obey. Do you understand that? Obe-ey?" Hiei drawled, drawing the last word out into a long lilting line.

Kurama stared over his shoulder blankly, revealing the scrapes on his face from his tackle against the wall.

Hiei harrumphed. "Of the slaves we took, you show the most promise of pleasing _his imperial highness,"_ He sneered the last three words.

Seeing Kurama still looking at him blankly, but fearfully, Hiei snorted, suddenly embarrassed by his position, his responsibilities to the court to provide the Emperor with a suitable fuck-toy from his low-class slaves.

"We'll see soon enough," he muttered caustically, and called a slave, without shame, to bring him oil.

The Eunuch, Narseh, brought it quickly, eyes skittering over the scene calmly. Hiei took no notice—a patrician must fuck, eat, shit, and die in front of and with the help of his servants—and oiled his cock up, masturbating himself idly but with intention, until he could shove himself in. It was all brusque, thoughtless, like a child kicking open an ant hill. Kurama felt ridden with shame, shame like lice, itching and biting at his skin. Unable to control himself, unable to fight with both arms nearly broken and half strangled as Hiei pulled at the noose, Kurama began to weep into the mattress as he felt muscular thighs press against the back of his own, himself forced wide, the strange sensations that could not have been farther from pleasant, even though there was pleasure, shooting up his spine as Hiei's cock was forced in with the help of the oil.

Kurama, humiliated, likened Hiei's deft technique with an animal in rut, though Hiei was not that. The long, slow, teasing glides and sudden, deep plunges stirred Kurama's member, but made his mind recoil.

And Kurama wept. He had no breath to rage, but his tears, and the saliva that dribbled from his mouth to the mattress, felt comforting, and so he sobbed in great choking gasps, relieved to do it. He bit his own lips rather than moan when Hiei, out of kindness or cruelty even the General himself couldn't tell, angled into Kurama's prostate, sending unwanted shocks up Kurama's spine.

Hiei had his eyes closed to keep himself from losing his erection, pained by the pitiful sight before him. Kurama's eyes were squeezed tight to let the tears be knocked out, though nothing stifled the ever more exhausted moans. Hiei ordered the two men, in a moment of pity, to let Kurama lower his arms, and hold them in a better position. Kurama tried to bite one man's arm, but found only the hand holding the noose tightening violently, the hard knuckles pressing into the back of Kurama's skull like a blow.

Hiei came, moaning, letting the last few thrusts slow down to a glide as Kurama kept completely still, his eyes shut, willing this to be over.

Hiei sighed and staggered, his body shivering with afterglow, and then ordered the legionary back to his unit, and the slave to the cellars, to be trussed up and tied to a column until Hiei needed him again.

* * *

><p><strong>Glossary:<strong>

Kohl: A dark-colored powder used as make-up, especially eye shadow, by the Ancients. It was made variously of crushed antimony, burnt almonds, lead, oxidized copper, ochre, ash, malachite and chrysocolla, a blue-green copper ore.

Octava Hour: Obviously, Ancient Civilizations had no solid way of measuring years or time that was functional, universal, or precise. In Rome, they did have sundials, water clocks, and hours of the day, however, and one of those hours was Octava, which would have lasted in spring from around our 1:00 P.M. to around our 2:15 P.M.


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